Thursday, October 30, 2008

As an attorney who is shocked and alarmed by the aggressive and unconscionable manner in which the Texas Supreme Court and Texas legislature have worked hand-in-hand to preclude entire categories of legitimate lawsuits from being pursued in the Texas courts for the benefit of corporate interests, I strongly urge Texans to vote for all Democratic candidates for the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas legislature as well as Congress and the lower courts!

Many voters overlook judicial races. However, this year there are many excellent judicial candidates on the ballot for whom I would implore all Texans to vote.

The Texas Supreme Court is currently composed entirely of Republican justices (nine in all), several of whom were originally appointed by Republican governors George W. Bush or Rick Perry and who have never been challenged by an opponent in any primary or general election! This Court's judicial activism on behalf of corporate interests has become a joke! For example, class actions can effectively no longer be brought in Texas courts because of the Texas Supreme Court's consistent refusal to certify classes and lawyers joke that the only time a Plaintiff can ever win in the Texas Supreme Court is when an insurance company is suing another insurance company! The Texas Supreme Court has also become known for actively doing away with legal rights and remedies upon which Texans have long relied to pursue remedies in court when they have been injured or financially harmed!

I strongly support Jim Jordan in his race for Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He is currently a well-respected District Court judge in Dallas County and his views on the role of judges can be found in his excellent editorial, which can be downloaded from his website (it is the bottom item) at http://www.judgejimjordan.com/press-kit/

Linda Yañez is another excellent candidate for the Texas Supreme Court. She is an appellate court justice on Texas' 13th Court of Appeals who currently teaches part time at Harvard Law School. I have met her and heard her speak on numerous occassions and can vouch for her intellect. I very much hope that she will be elected to the Texas Supreme Court.

Sam Houston, my former opponent in the Democratic Primary, is also an excellent candidate who will be a significant improvement over the Republican incumbent.

There are also numerous excellent Democratic candidates for the Texas trial and Appellate courts, which remain dominated by Republicans who have often appeared beholden to corporate interests.

Three excellent judicial candidates in Dallas County are Eric Moye, Ken Molberg and incumbent judge Loraine Raggio. Eric Moye is a Harvard educated former judge whose intellect is immediately apparent in any conversation and who is impressive in every respect. Ken Molberg is a well-known, highly respected litigator with decades of litigation experience. Loraine Raggio is a knowledgeable and fair judge in whose court I have appeared. I wholeheartedly encourage all Dallas County voters to vote for all three.

The Republican-dominated Texas legislature has, likewise, mandated new deadlines which have effectively shortened limitations periods in which many kinds of cases can be brought and imposed such honerous obstacles to bringing cases in court that it has become nearly impossible to find a lawyer willing to bring a medical malpractice case in even the most egregious cases of medical malpractice. As a result, the worst doctors in the country have been flocking to Texas where they know they can get away with medical malpractice without being sued! Likewise, homeowners who have been cheated by unscrupulous and/or unskilled homebuilders must now go through an elaborate, lengthy and expensive process administered by the Texas Residential Construction Commission before they can even bring a claim before an arbitrator -- access to the courts has been effectively eliminated in construction cases in Texas -- and then can only do so within a very limited period of time. For this reason it is also imperative that Texans elect Democrats to the Texas legislature!

Two excellent candidates for the Texas legislature, whom I know personally are Emil Reichstadt, who is running for the Texas House of Representatives, and Rain Levy Minns, who is running for the Texas Senate.

I also strongly support Rick Noriega in his statewide race for the U.S. Senate and urge others to support him as well.

Likewise, I urge voters to vote for Eric Roberson, whom I have known for many years, in his important race for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

It is a stunning development that John McCain has decided to channel Joseph McCarthy and revive a shameful chapter in American history with his accusations that Barak Obama is a socialist or a Marxist! Is Joseph McCarthy an American hero? Has McCarthy not been sufficiently discredited as a demagogue and a cretin whose venomous accusations on a national stage made a mockery of American values and justice? Does it not reveal John McCain and Sarah Palin as contemptuous Joseph McCarthy wannabes that they would embrace McCarthyism as a campaign strategy? Isn't it time that somebody ask John McCain and Sarah Palin -- as Joseph McCarthy was asked by Special Counsel for the Army Joseph Welch -- if, at long last, they have no sense of decency left?

McCain's argument that Obama is a socialist or a Marxist because Obama wants to cut taxes for Americans making less than $200,000 and rollback Bush's tax cuts for Americans making over $250,000 is, further, extraordinarily deceitful and hypocritical since McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts in the first place! Does that mean that McCain was a Marxist or a socialist when he opposed Bush's tax cuts? Or is Obama being called a socialist or a Marxist because he supports greater tax cuts for the middle class than McCain? If that is the criteria, then every Republican who has supported tax cuts for the middle class is a socialist or a Marxist! Nor should it be forgotten that while Republican hero Ronald Reagan pushed through tax cuts that predominantly benefitted the wealthy, he hypocritically made unemployment benefits taxable, thereby "redistributing wealth" from the unemployed to the rich! The bottom line is that for Republicans raising taxes on the recently unemployed and the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich is not a problem, but cutting taxes on the middle class and the recently unemployed while raising them on the rich is unthinkable!

Baltasar D. Cruz on election day in 1988

Here is a picture of me published in the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was a campaign voluteer for the Dukakis-Bentsen Campaign in 1988.

Baltasar D. Cruz re: Hillary Clinton and Republicans, July 7, 1996

This letter was published in the Dallas Morning News on July 7, 1996 and was in response to Republican criticisms of Hillary Clinton for saying that she tried to imagine conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Baltasar D. Cruz re: the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Feb. 16, 2003

This letter was published in the Dallas Morning News on February 16, 2003, before the U.S. invaded Iraq.